Irreverent, occasionally incisive, mostly insane

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Am a little sad that I won’t be going down to see Brian McKnight perform down in Singapore. But I can’t afford to take a break right now with everything else I have going on in my life.

But heck, there’s always YouTube. Brian’s got great vocal technique, range and then there’s his sick ability to play the piano, trumpet and guitar. And I’ve been a fan of his years before the radio was playing his Back at One song to death. It was random – I turned on the TV and a video of his song One Last Cry was playing. I hunted the album down and soon I was listening to the tape to death, and I’d realised I’d heard his voice before. He’d featured on a few songs on Vanessa William’s debut album. A really decent pop album that one, and his duet with her on Love Is is still one of my favourite songs ever.

One last cry Before I leave it all behind I’ve got to put you out of my mind This time, stop living a lie I guess I’m down to one last cry

I wish I was that easy to make it one last tear, and one last time that I stop mourning over a loss. But it took two years for me before I could stop tearing at just the mention of my grandmother. And that surprises people, because the people I deal with at work assume I’m tough as nails, brassy, slightly arrogant and super-confident. For work, I have to ‘assume the position’. But I am very emotional and I feel a lot; even if I’m good at not showing it. Which unfortunately makes me a target for people who think I need taking down a notch, who think I’m unfeeling or that I think I’m ‘too good’ for them.

Some people think “Oh, you can change then.” Problem is, even if you change, they’ll end up disliking you for changing. So I’ve decided that I might change my approach to things, if it’s pointed out my approach isn’t appropriate. But I’m not changing myself to please other people because by trying too hard to bend over backwards, you end up pleasing no one at all. Changing your approach does not equate changing who you are.

So I’m always going to be the hard biscuit with a soft, gooey centre. I will just need to figure out how to break less teeth.

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Randomness; I’ve discovered my second disliked word after ‘synergy’. Impactful. Ugh. It’s a horrible non-word which you won’t find in the Oxford dictionary but, unfortunately, is in Merriam-Webster.

Urbandictionary.com defines the word perfectly: “impactful – A non-existent word coined by corporate advertising, marketing and business drones to make their work sound far more useful, exciting and beneficial to humanity than it really is.”

But the best description has to come from ABC News Radio. The following anecdote really made me laugh:

‘”A NewsRadio listener has emailed asking me to expose an ugly new word.

We should leave it where we found it – in the rubbish bin of American journalism.

Well, I’m always happy to cheerfully deride ugly new words that we don’t need – and the word is question here is impactful – and it’s certainly ugly, and certainly unnecessary (the two words “with impact” will do the same job). The listener says he originally heard impactful used by work colleagues in Singapore, more recently he’s heard it used by the manager of the Australian cricket team in a radio interview and by work colleagues in the United States. The word is of American origin. I found it listed in the unabridged Webster’s where it’s supported by a quote from a movie review about “some of the most impactful heroines of current films”. So this ugly and unnecessary word appears to have been coined by American journalists. And we should leave it where we found it – in the rubbish bin of American journalism.”